An old timer told me once that coincidence is how god protects his 
anonymity. I went to a meeting last night thinking I would be 
presenting someone with a one-year medallion. Due to circumstances 
beyond his control he was unable to make it. Obviously he had 
something more important to do than celebrate his sobriety though 
I can't imagine myself placing something on a higher priority level
than my recovery but that's just me.  

Anyway, when I arrived at the meeting, I met an old friend, a man I
sponsor but haven't seen for quite some time. And of course the 
reason I haven't seen him is because he found more important things
to do than go to meetings or call his sponsor or work the program 
and inevitably he woke up and found himself right back where he 
started. 

Even I, perfect as I may appear to be, once placed my job in front 
of my recovery and managed somehow to go 19 days without attending 
a meeting. Well, I was working in a recovery house so I used that 
as justification for not having to go to meetings. I didn't drink,
but if you had sat down and talked to me for five minutes you 
would think that I had relapsed because I acted the same way I did
when I drank. And I think if I had gone a few days more I might 
have picked up a drink. I'll never know and I never want to find
out.

The only thing that saved me was I went to a meeting to see if one
of my clients whom I had mandated to attend certain meetings had 
actually gone to the meeting. When I walked in a guy was sharing 
from the podium about all the gifts he had received in sobriety, 
about getting the job back, meeting a great girl, settling down, 
buying a home, and a car and a boat and a snowmobile and so forth 
and how each time he acquired one of those things it took the place
of a meeting. It was so subtle and insidious he said that he never
even saw it coming. One morning he woke up in detox trying to 
figure out what had happened. 

Talk about a rude awakening. I immediately forgot why I had gone to
the meeting and vowed never to place anything before my recovery.
The next day I took a leave of absence from the place I was 
working at and went to meetings daily.

Don't get me wrong. I still have a job and I still miss meetings 
or events that I would prefer not to miss. AA isn't going to pay
 my mortgage or my visa bills or my car insurance  ah, life was 
so much simpler when I slept under the bridge. The point is 
without AA, without going to meetings, without sponsorship, 
without the steps, without God, I would be right back where I 
started and it would be so subtle and so insidious that I would 
never see it coming.